


No Small Thing

by ShutUpandPull



Category: Absentia (TV)
Genre: Absentia, F/M, Romance, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:49:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25711636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShutUpandPull/pseuds/ShutUpandPull
Summary: A 3x10 post-ep. The morning after.
Relationships: Emily Byrne/Cal Isaac
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21





	No Small Thing

**Author's Note:**

> For V, who loves them.

It’d been more than seven years since Emily had woken to the light of a new day in a bed with a man beside her, yet there Cal now lay, bathed in the dawning glow of the sun seeping through the curtains of Room 227, hers alone within those four walls, and as beautiful as anything she’d ever seen.

Seven goddamn years. The computation of calendar pages delivered the harshest of stings and she unleashed a silent scream. With every compulsion to release another, she wondered if the screams would ever come to an end, if her body would ever be free of them. It seemed they were hiding inside behind her every door, in her every corner, within her every shadow. Infinite.

But they were fewer when he was near.

With deliberate care not to wake him, she sat up, pulled on the tee he’d stripped her out of the night before, and dropped her feet to the floor before turning back for one more look. She’d already allowed herself the selfish indulgence of several that morning. To her relief, he hadn’t vanished. It hadn’t been just another cruel dream.

_I could get used to us_ , she caught herself thinking as her sleepy eyes pored again over the curves and angles of his face. It was such a seductive face, the way it captured and held her, and so strong. How often it’d been strong enough for the both of them, in those moments she was being pulled under, drowning from the weight of nonexistence.

There were secrets written there, too, she knew. They were tangible to her not by any failure of camouflage, not by any sort of trick of magic, but because in their glimmer she recognized her own, and though that unnerved her, she found it a challenge to tear herself away.

In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and splashed her face with cool water in effort to feel a bit more human. She hadn’t slept much, and mornings already weren’t high on her list of favorite things. Rolled up behind the door was her mat, which she grabbed before heading out. Emily counted on little. That’d been a lesson taught not sought, and though, as a result, her life now was one of few habits, the stillness of yoga was often the only stillness there was.

In the open space beside the bed, she with her mat beneath her sat atop the room’s carpet, whose deep-blue nylon stretched from wall to wall like the sea. Had she opted to purchase the mat in yellow, the only other option available in that shop in Brussels or Quebec or London, wherever it’d been, she might’ve resembled a lone, shipwrecked soul, bobbing around in a life raft awaiting rescue. Except she wasn’t alone. He was there. In the hush, his breath was certain.

She curled upward into a Cobra pose and held there, let her eyelids slide shut as she inhaled and exhaled through the welcome stretch, despite the goon-fight-induced pinch that roared now and then behind her left shoulder blade.

A flash of Cal’s naked body above hers pierced the darkness like the lightning of a summer night’s storm, and it struck her square and deep. She’d only had him but a few times, but he was already a craving, and six months apart had only served to intensify her appetite. 

Folding into a Child’s pose, she gifted her muscles a moment of rest. She hadn’t fussed with the thermostat, and there was a chill in the room that the texture of her bare skin hadn’t yet calmed from. It was simply something she noticed and then dismissed just as quickly.

Emily didn’t live discomfort like most. Not anymore. Not after the tank and the torture and the hell of years away from her son, when even a single day away would’ve been agonizing. Now there was little pain she couldn’t endure. Now she burned it as fuel, harnessed it to feed her fire.

Her eyelids fluttered when she heard Cal stir, when he stretched or yawned or engaged in some other morning wriggle that prompted a faint squeak to escape the lips she’d worked so thoroughly in the hours before.

She held her position, though, remained silent, her forehead resting on her mat of mint green, her face hidden when he spoke his first words.

“Where are you?” he said sounding defeated, as though she’d called out to him, taunted him from some hidden nook as a playmate engaged in a child’s game might. “Get back in here, Byrne.”

Emily’s eyes opened and slivered with a smile, but she left the demand unacknowledged, instead let it linger on the air for a long moment.

“And why should I want to do that?” she replied finally.

Like hers, his response came on the far side of a calculated pause. “You’re right. Never mind.”

Curiosity swiftly got the better of her. That and she wanted to be where he wanted her. She rolled up, crawled to the bed, and climbed into her vacated spot. On his back, he was uncovered to the waist, naked beyond the gathering of sheets there, she well knew, which warmed her everywhere.

“You interrupted my yoga,” she told him like that wasn’t precisely what she’d hoped for, like it hadn’t taken everything in her power not to rouse him earlier in a way he wouldn’t soon forget. “You should apologize.”

Cal angled his head on the pillow and, wrestling his gaze northward from places he very much wished to visit again, met her eye, spent an interval unapologetically drinking her in. It’d only been a matter of a few hours, but he was already parched. “Got up here pretty quick. Were you really enjoying it that much?” he shot back, punctuated the retort with a yawn. “You should kiss me good morning.”

She looked him square in the eye and deadpanned a single word. “Where?” When he laughed, she laughed. “Strange bed… did you sleep okay?” she asked, softer.

He reached out and she let him pull her in. His lips nearly brushed hers. “I slept great, what there was of it. You didn’t snore once, Byrne.” She caught the reference immediately and the corners of her mouth curved. “Are you going to kiss me now?”

How she did, all greedy and deep and long, so long that even after they parted, she could feel the prickle on her skin from the steady scrape of his whiskers. They left in their absence such an intoxicating hum.

When he was through being pleased with himself for her surrender and letting her know it, his entire demeanor changed almost in a blink. He half-straightened his body, his back propped up against the room’s gaudy headboard with its overly polished, azure fabric and patternless gold swirls, and gazed at her as she did him, so many words between them unspoken.

“You’re not coming back, are you?” If a pin had dropped onto a feather, it would’ve sounded like booming thunder in the silence that followed. “Even with Crown behind the desk again.”

Emily’s chin dropped. The question she knew would come had come, yet it still felt as though she’d taken a hook, fallen hard to the mat.

“I want to stop shitty people from doing shitty things, Cal,” she said before angling her head up, “but the F.B.I. isn’t who I am anymore. I already went back once, and I know that now. It wasn’t Gunnarsen. It just… it stopped feeling like I belonged there, even before what happened to Alice, even before the suspension.”

Cal’s eyes swept the room and came back to her. “And this is where you belong? Alone in hotel rooms, everywhere and nowhere at all?”

His tone suggested anger, but she knew him better than that. With a gentle hand, she touched his bare skin. “I don’t know. I just know that I went from being in that fucking tank to the Bureau, and sometimes they felt like the same thing. I know they told you to watch me, to make sure I wasn’t or didn’t… whatever. I can live without a lot of things, Cal, but not without trust, not when it’s so hard to find.”

He glanced down at her hand, where it rested willingly, purposefully on his body. “Do you trust me?”

“You’re naked in my bed, aren’t you?” There were other ways to have given the obvious answer, heavier, more solemn ways, but none struck as fitting. “What do you think?”

“I was right. I knew I’d come find you and you’d get all mushy on me.” He took her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed her palm. “I’m sorry I interrupted your yoga,” he said with a smile.

Emily grabbed her tee by the hem and lifted it over her head. It was the only piece of clothing she was wearing. Tossing it aside, she slid on top of his body beneath the sheets. Just then, the room’s heat kicked on and began to whir from the vent above the bed, precisely when she no longer needed it.

“No, you’re not.” With an open mouth, she leaned in, sampled a taste of his skin. Her eyes locked on his. “Neither am I.”

**XXXX**

The world around them was palpably still on that wintry morning, as they strolled along the path through the park nearby the hotel. They encountered only a handful of souls out and about: a dog on a leash with its owner in tow, a runner puffing clouds of mist into the grey, an elderly couple, arm in arm, giggling about one thing or another, yet none seemed to pay the two any notice. It was as if they were ghosts, two alone in that place, a world inside the world.

“I think the last time we talked you were somewhere a hell of a lot warmer than this, Byrne,” Cal observed through clenched teeth. “You couldn’t have sent me a postcard from there? It’s fuckin’ freezing.”

Emily grinned, the two hoods she had pulled up over her head masking it from view. “What, and Boston’s some year-round tropical paradise? You’re getting soft, not having me around to kick your ass in the ring, toughen you up.” After a few seconds, she slid her hand from her jacket pocket, wrapped it around his, teased. “You don’t need an excuse, you know. You can just say you want to hold my hand.”

His wind-pinked cheeks lifted. “Can I?” When he stopped without warning and she tried to move on, their hold broke, but his eyes lured her back. “What else can I say?” He asked not in the hypothetical, but because there were things, things he’d been saving all his life only for her, things she deserved to hear because there were none truer.

“What…” His lips were turning some shade of blue, she noticed, not the blue of the sea of carpet or of the dizzying headboard, but another. It distracted her, but in a way too pleasurable to fight when her mind flashed to that bitter night in Moldova, to the two of them, soaked to the bone and wandering its streets, to him trying to warm them both with sweet words. He was so often there in her memory. “What else is there?”

A sudden gust whipped across the path and cut right through them. It fazed neither.

Cal deliberated as he stood there, his toes curled around the edge of the cliff, then he leapt. “You can’t be someone I love and lose, Byrne. And that has nothing to do with me trying to talk you out of the work you’re doing or wanting to ride in on some white horse. I know how stubborn you are, and what a waste of time that would be. You’re one of the best partners I ever had. I understand better than anyone how capable you are.”

“One of the best?” she squeezed in when he paused to blow a quick burst of warm air into his cupped hands.

“Yeah. What do you expect? You did threaten to shoot me once. Have I mentioned it’s fucking freezing out here?”

His smile inspired one of her own. “You deserved it. Wuss,” she retorted when he stepped in closer. Whatever might’ve come after was lost with his proximity.

“Every day I miss you. Every day you’re wherever the hell you are and I’m not, I miss you. Maybe that’s not something you want to hear. Maybe that’s not something you feel, but I’ve never felt this, either. I’ve never wanted so much to love someone.”

Emily reached up and trailed a delicate finger along the bluish curve of his lip. “I think about you, Cal, all the time. Nothing makes me feel less alone.” The bare branches of the trees at the path’s edge crackled and clacked in the howling wind. “You asked me that day what I need. I need to hear your voice and see your face.” With her palm she cupped his cheek. “Touch your skin.”

Cal’s eyes closed when his forehead came to rest against hers. “Byrne,” he whispered and then softly kissed her lips.

“I love you,” she told him again, though he knew not of her first profession all those months before. He opened his green eyes to the heat of hers. “Take me back to the bed. I want to show you.”

Along their way, that same elderly couple, still arm in arm, still giggling about this or that, passed by again. Emily stopped and turned. _Maybe_ , she thought, and watched as the pair continued down the path together. For the Emily she had become, maybe was no small thing.


End file.
